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The Kids Are All Right

Are queers just like everyone else?

Are queers just ordinary human beings, with the same hopes and fears and neuroses and dreams as everybody? Or are queers fundamentally different from straight people, with profoundly different ways of dealing with sex and gender and love and family?

It's a question that shows up most dramatically in debates between assimilationists and separatists (and those of us on the spectrums in between). But it also shows up in the hearts and minds of queers -- and straight people with queers in their lives -- when we're searching our souls in private about who we are and how we fit into the world.

And it's a question explored in fascinating, funny, painful, complicated, and almost excruciatingly human detail in the brilliant new film, "The Kids Are All Right."

Along with a whole host of equally compelling questions about sex, humanity, and selfhood.... and how they intertwine.

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Thus begins my latest Media Darling column on CarnalNation, The Kids Are All Right. To find out more, read the rest of the piece. (And if you feel inspired to comment here, please consider cross-posting your comment to Carnal Nation -- they like comments there, too.) Enjoy!

The thing I've always admired most about my gay friends is their ability to see two (or more) sides of everything. They never seem to have any difficulty understanding my perspectives, but at the same time, they can offer an alternative that sometimes just completely blows my mind, and, as someone who takes pride in having an overdeveloped sense of irony, most of the gay guys I've known make me look like an amateur.

But the sad thing about this is that I think they've developed these characteristics due to the demands of surviving in a culture that views them as outsiders, and one in which they had to pretend to be something they were not, and something they often regarded with contempt, disgust or even hatred, and having to figure out whom they could trust and when they could be themselves.

For a long time I just regarded these characteristics as integral parts of my friends' personalities--part of their gayness, if you will--and part of why I loved them so much, but lately I've begun to wonder if these characteristics will die out as gayness becomes more accepted. I long to see the day when people will just be free to love whomever they choose without worrying about whether they're gay, str8 or bi, and people won't assume a couple means two people of opposite genders, but now I'm feeling a pang of nostalgia for the days when it meant something when someone came out to you.

I'm glad those days are over, but I don't want to see gayness fade to irrelevance. In a way it's like the way I love the blues, even though they wouldn't exist had it not been for slavery. I don't know how to reconcile my feelings about things like that.

Well, anyway, I just stopped by to offer congratulations on the overturning of prop. 8. I'm sure it's not the last word, but hopefully another nail in the coffin of prejudice.